We Have Never Been Brodern

We initially reached out to our Founding Editor to ask him if he might give us his thoughts on the recent discursive flare-up surrounding a peculiar new portmanteau that first appeared in a February 2025 review, by Federico Perelmuter in the Los Angeles Review of Books, of László Krasznahorkai’s latest doorstopper. “I’d love to,” JSR replied, “but I’m working on a scholarly article right now. It’s called ‘Al-Ghazali, Geulincx, Malebranche — What’s With All These Broccasionalists?’.” He was almost certainly joking (though with him one can never be sure), but one thing he was definitely quite sincere about was his strong recommendation that we turn to Thomas Peermohamed Lambert for this assignment instead. Thomas, whom some readers will already know from his incarnation as Col. Francis Cecil Cholmondeley Haslam GCM, back in The Hinternet’s “Bun phase”, is one of the brightest young lights out there in the world of letters. A true Borgesian, a Hispanophile and a polyglot, a translator and a philosopher of translation, he’s just released his first novel, Shibboleth, the advance proofs of which we regularly pass around and fondle with pride here at The Hinternet’s editorial offices — pride, that is, in the knowledge that Thomas is also on our Masthead as an Associate Editor, which we just know is going to make us look very good indeed someday soon. So let’s let TPL make some sense of this strange moment, when, it seems, you are just as likely to get ruthlessly dragged online for reading the good hard stuff as for reading the dumb easy stuff. Please explain what the hell’s going on, Thomas! —The Hinternet

1.

If you’ve been paying attention to the culture recently, you may have noticed that the people who spent the last ten years saying “let people enjoy things” are now fairly intent on making sure people don’t enjoy things. The prevailing sensibility seems to have shifted from “we should all slurp our gavage of mass entertainment with indiscriminate eagerness”, to “the more swathes of the culture you deride or dismiss out of hand, the cooler you are”, almost overnight. This is not, in itself, remarkable: aesthetic goal-posts have always moved, and if this particular development means the next decade will subject me to slightly fewer superhero movies and long exegetical pronouncements on the love life of Taylor Swift than the last, it can’t be entirely negative. Recently, however, the sneering has taken a distinctly literary turn. The world-spirit is on its high horse, and the new target is something called “brodernism.”

This causes me a degree of concern, as on first inspection “brodernism” sounds like the kind of thing I would like. The term was coined in a review of an obscure Hungarian novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and refers to what is apparently a common fetish among young men for difficult fiction in translation, an indiscriminate greediness for anything that could be described as “maximalist”, “avant-garde”, “speculative”, “modernist”, etc. I not only quite like works often described by these adjectives, but I am male, and twenty-seven years old, which is perhaps the age at which the literary bloke is at his most repellent.

To cap it all off, I am deep into a doctorate on the work of Jorge Luis Borges — who is, perhaps more than any other author, the founding patriarch of brodernism. Indeed, I suspect that much of the LARB reviewer’s antipathy can be chalked up to the fact that he is himself Argentinian, and has therefore grown up in the shadow of the novela borgesiana — a terrifying genre in which young men like me hold forth on some combination of sex, classificatory systems, computers, Nietzsche, Kafka, and sex again for, on average, about eight-hundred pages.

Still, when I first read the offending review, I did indeed experience a little pang of shame. There was something about the “brodernism” coinage that rang true, some intimation of a natural kind that might exist beyond one critic’s grumpy taxonomy. Why young men? Why these books? Of course, I’m not suggesting that we take the idea that difficult, foreign stuff is for boys and easy, vernacular stuff is for girls at all seriously: any reader of The Books of Jacob, or The Golden Notebook, or the Camino de Perfección, knows that this is not a legitimate division, as does anyone who has set foot in the distinctly boy-free zone of a university modern-languages department. But even if there is no perfect gender split here —it’s simply 2025, and the internet has decreed that any big division in the culture has to be gendered— there is a discernible divergence of sensibility. Some people compulsively seek out foreignness to such a degree that they become caricatures; other people have come to mistrust foreignness so much that they see it as a kind of aesthetic smoke-screen, a fancy new way of saying nothing at all. I suspect I belong to the first camp. So what is it about me that’s so annoying?